Tofu Marsala

I had a 40% off coupon at Borders, so I did the natural thing: bought another cookbook. (J and I were just talking, and agreed that we might need to go on a cookbook diet, and get rid of some that we never/rarely use.)

I'm pretty excited about the new book: 500 Vegan Recipes. Here is a nice review of the book.

I made the Tofu Marsala on page 259, and was pretty happy with it. I tried hard to follow the recipe exactly, to give my first dish from the book a fair shot.

When I make it again, I'd definitely add a little more salt and pepper to the flour mix that you batter the tofu steaks in before frying them, and maybe some paprika or cayenne.

One of the few substitutions I did make was using a portabello mushroom instead of button mushrooms. I both like them better and thought the texture would hold up better, and they were quite a bit cheaper at Whole Paycheck.

Dredged in the flour batter mixture, they go into the olive oil. Kind of unattractive, no? Don't worry: it'll get better.

While the tofu steaks fried, I decided to get shitfaced through mixing cheap fortified wines. Actually, the recipe calls for 1/2c. of marsala and 1/4 cup of sherry.

Okay, starting to look quite a bit better.

Added the mushrooms, which actually drop the appearance a couple notches, if you ask me.

With the addition of the cheap foritifed wines. Woo!

Lidded and cooking for another ten minutes,

it results in something real tasty looking.

After flipping over the tofu steaks to ensure they are well cooked on both sides.

Unnecessary mid-process shot of taking the tofu out of the pan:

to dry some of the oil, while I finish up some kaffir lime rice:

to mix it with. Pretty damn tasty! I did add some sri racha sauce, but it would've been fine without as well. I toyed with adding a couple jalapeno slices, but was hungry enough that I just wanted to eat already.

Summer

Ahhhhhhhhhhh... In the middle of going through pictures for a friend, I came across this shot of my ridiculously lush backyard garden in SLC, circa July 2006:

Very roughly, from left to right, that is: random tree stuff, tomatoes in raised bed, summer squash and herbs in raised bed, hops growing on the fence, zucchini and pumpkin in the ground.

Oh, how I miss a backyard, heat, and tons of sunlight.

Productive!

Today has been super productive, though I still haven't cleaned any of the piles of bicycle parts laying all about the condo. There has also been a lot of consumption, but most of it necessary, and most of it with coupons and/or discounts.

I dropped off the old dead inkjet multifunction and a small baggie of dead batteries at the Decatur e-waste recycling event, bought a new garbage disposal (though the new terminology seems to be "food waste disposal") with a 20% off coupon, bought a fun new vegan cookbook (with a 40% off coupon), and bought some grcoeries at Whole Paycheck to try out the new cookbook.

Now comes the less fun part: replacing our old, crappy, cranky, leaky food waste disposal with the new one. It's the same brand, just slightly less crappy, so theoretically, it should be fairly straightforward. We'll see. As most of you know, I'm reasonably handy, but oftentimes these things are, well, non-trivial when they should be trivial. I do wish that our fancy high-rise condo with the gorgeous granite countertops and stainless steel appliances and floor to ceiling windows on two sides hadn't been equipped with bottom of the line Home Despot garbage appliances where you couldn't see them (like the 1/3hp Badger 1 in-sinkerator food disposal, $79.99 at both Lowe's and Home Despot.) I splurged and bought the next model up to replace it, the 1/2hp Badger 5. Big timer, me!

What's the worst case, really? Well, the worst case is pretty fucking expensive: if I mess it up sufficiently, I could need to call out a plumber on a Saturday night or Sunday day, which would really, well, suck. (I'd actually probably just use the bathroom sinks and wait until Monday to avoid a weekend service call.)

The instructions claim I need only a screwdriver, pliers, and plumber's putty. I have these. The bourbon is at hand. Let's get to work!

Photos may follow, especially if I'm feeling triumphant. Or really, really sad.

Intense

It's been, on several fronts, a pretty intense couple of days for e-mail. Almost all of it good, but just: intense. I won't go into a lot of details because (a) it could involve confidences, and I keep secrets better than almost anyone I have ever known, and (b) the subjects wouldn't make sense, or have a whole lot of resonance for most readers, without extensive backstory and explanation. Suffice it to say it has been a busy email time. (Phone as well.)

One friend told me that reading this blog is like talking to me, which I am tickled by. (Though I suppose some might not think it a good thing. But then, they're probably not voracious readers of my blog...)

It's beautiful here: one of those slightly hazy but bright days, with alternating sharp and soft definition in the clouds. Stone Mountain is clearly visible to the east. But I ain't got no bike to ride. Boo! It's strange, even to me, that I'm feeling withdrawal symptoms from not having a bike to ride. Yes, as I said to the friend mentioned above, I am that dork that got a bicycle part tattooed on his body (which most of you have seen; it's a shark-toothed chaingring on my right deltoid), and has the next tattoo planned, also a bicycle part (a mobius strip made out of bicycle chain, going around the deltoid and tricep on my left arm.)

In boring computer news, the score is now Ubuntu 2, Me 2.5! For no apparent reason, when I shut down the laptop yesterday and then later started it back it, it did the screen resolution properly, taking away the blank strips. It must've been scared by my putting on BDUs. (To paraphrase my best friend the computer genius, when all else fails, fix it with a hammer!)

Okay: I'm going to finish this up, take a shower, make a smoothie, and start cleaning up the multiple piles of bicycle parts which are literally strewn all over the condo. And consider which of them I want to get tattooed with. The smoothie is the odds-on favorite.

Score: Ubuntu 2, Me 2

The three faithful readers of my boring blog (love you guys!) might remember a post a while ago about the battle I'm fighting with my Ubuntu install on this very (Dell 700m) laptop, where the score was Ubuntu 1, Me 1. If not, you should go back and briefly review that post, so that this will make a little more sense.

In the intervening time since that last post, the Karmic install was getting more and more buggy: crashing, freezing, and the power management was just a complete fuckup. I had my best friend the computer genius try to fix it, and finally he asked if I really even need the power management function (e.g., to sleep or hibernate the computer after long periods of disuse.) I didn't, since when I'm using this laptop, I'm always using it, and then I pretty much always manually sleep it or shut it down. So he just turned off power management, which worked like a charm. For about an hour.

Fast forward to yesterday: I'm finally sufficiently unhappy with the bugginess and instability of Karmic that I decide to go the big ol' pain in the ass route, and regress to Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. It's a big ol' pain in the ass because reverse-updating essentially means a full wipe of your hard drive and completely new install of the new version as if it's a new OS. Yeah, there are various ways of tricking your system into the downgrade, but many advise against them.

So I got out the external hard drive, and backed up all the data. (Well, I actually forgot the pictures, but that's okay, because I had minimal images on this machine.) Then I generated a bootable installation of Jaunty on a flash drive. Then installed it. Then installed the hundreds of updates that Ubuntu developers have released since Jaunty came out. Then installed all of the software I like.

So the score as of yesterday evening was Ubuntu 1, Me 2. HAH!

I just started up the computer this morning, and had to laugh out loud: I'm back to the bug that existed in my last go-round with Jaunty, which is particular to some models of laptops: the computer thinks I have a smaller screen or lower refresh rate than I do, and cannot be made to believe otherwise. So I have two black bands of empty screen running vertically on both sides of my display, wasting about two inches of screen real estate.

Ubuntu 2, Me 2. The battle rages on!

Hiking panoramas!

As promised in a recent post about my hiking on the AT, here are a couple photos from my AT hike. Specifically, panoramas from atop Blood Mountain, Georgia:

What is kind of interesting is that they are essentially the exact same shot, taken from the exact same position, seconds apart. The only difference is that the first one was taken with the camera in a vertical (rotated 90 degrees) position, while the second one was taken with the camera in standard position. Relatively little difference, though I actually expected a little more.

Bikes and stuff.

For about the first time since the third grade, I don't own a bicycle. Well, sorta: the touring bike I mentioned a few days ago that I've already put down a 30% deposit on is as good as purchased. But not having a bike in the house, or available, is nevertheless kind of interesting. And a little strange. And a little sad. (I know this sounds kind of weird, but whatever: I love bikes, and I love cycling.)

I sold my mountain bike/commuter bike/errand bike/half-assed touring bike today for $200. I really think it was a good deal for the buyer, and am happy that he will use it well. I got a lot of good use out of it, and it's time to move on: it just really wasn't the right bike for me, for touring and all the other things I want to do. This, on top of selling my road bike last month for a screaming deal to a friend, has me bicycle-less for the first time since I was a complete dumbass in the early 80s, and I left the lock key to the Mongoose BMX bike my grandmother had given me for Christmas and/or a birthday in the bag attached to the handlebars. While at soccer practice. At an elementary school. Duh.

My one, very slight disappointment is that I now don't have a bike to ride Critical Mass with tomorrow night. Time to work on borrowing a bike!

Cheapass glasses

At around midnight last night, I tried to tweak one of the nose pads on my glasses, and it broke pretty much instantly. Fortunately, I have a backup pair. Unfortunately, they're kind of dorky looking, and don't fit quite right. So I ordered up my next pair from the absurdly cheap Zenni Optical, which are essentially identical to the last ones I had, which were probably my favorite glasses since I began wearing glasses in the seventh grade:



It's probably cause and effect: you sort of get what you pay for with $9.95 glasses from the informationsuperinfobahn. But those lasted almost two years, so if the other option is paying 2000 percent more for basically the same mass produced junk at an eyeglass shop or optometry office, I'll happily deal with waiting a week to ten days for them to come in.

Hiking and biking

Got back from a four day backpacking trip on the AT [insert obligatory Argentinian mistress joke here] on Sunday, and am now scurrying to catch up. Pictures to follow. The hiking itself was okay: very physically strenuous, as the Georgia section of the AT is basically constant uphill then downhill then repeat. They call these "gaps" in the north Georgia mountains. I call them calf destroying masochism. One very good thing came out of it: I got out of my system the desire I'd had since I was about 13 to thru-hike the entire AT. I'll probably keep going out for a few days to a week at a time, but the AT itself is kind of annoying, largely because of the human subculture it's populated by. I met about 50 people in four days, and liked about two of them.

Yesterday I ordered my new bike, which I'm super extremely excited about: a Surly Long Haul Trucker, one of the premier touring bicycles out there, especially the price point:


It should come in to our excellent local bike shop, Outback Bikes, in Little Five Points, on Friday, and be built and ready to go by Saturday or Monday. Woo woo woo! I'll certainly be blogging more about it soon, and am already planning a shakedown tour to Savannah.

Snakes on a Plane

Or at least snakes disguised as human beings. I really need to try to avoid the ATL-SLC flights on Delta that have a customer base on par with Greyhound at 1am in the back when there was a stop within sprinting distance of a liquor store earlier in the evening. (Yes, I've been down that road. More than once. But fewer times than, ahem, at least one reader of this blog.)

I fly a lot, and have seen people try to stuff some silly things into overhead bins, but some of these people took the cake. One guy had a 24” or 26” rollaboard that extended in width so that it was about twice as wide as a standard rollaboard, and waaaay too long to fit in wheels first. He seemed mystified when the laws of physics didn't bend to his superior will or repeated bin door slamming (which the flight attendant nicely told him wasn't gong to work.) He ultimately managed to find an empty bin and, no kidding, filled nearly the entire thing with it. I really thought he might break the plastic of the top part of the overhead bin.

Then about five more people got on with almost equally obnoxious “carryon” luggage, and appeared hurt and saddened that the plane couldn't accommodate them. All the while, everyone is ignoring the “please don't put your jackets in the overhead bins until everyone has their luggage in” requests. These are not small overheads: this is a 757-200, and the bins have been extended. My standard sized 22” rollaboard fit easily, wheels first.

The guy sitting in the middle seat next to me sits down, plops down his HMS Host Bag O' Crap, immediately bogarts the entire armrest, and whips out his cellphone. He starts loudly complaining about how bummed he is that he didn't get an upgrade (which are complimentary, in order of elite status, fare class, and various other mysterious factors) because “I really have a ton of work to do.” He spent the 3.5 hour flight sleeping, flipping through a magazine, and eating his sandwich (a turkey club from Au Bon Pain, which he vigorously tore apart, plucking out the bacon and dropping it onto the wrapper from perilous heights. This causes little blobs of unidentifiable sauce to fly toward the guy in the window seat who, for better or worse, was too engrossed in his thick library juvenile collection fantasy novel, which he read quietly while moving his mouth to the words, to notice.

(BREAKING NEWS: From the cubicle in the Delta Sky Club immediately across from me, the woman yelling into her cell phone: “He has done some nice crowns in my mouth. But this particular problem wasn't addressed. It's been growing on me [loud cackling laughter.] [pause] And I'm not that nervous in a chair, and a couple of Advil will take care of anything I imagine. Ha ha ha. Okay, a small handful, maybe.”)

Back to the snakes.

Then the guy immediately in front of me needs to grill the flight attendant on where the power supplies are. She points it out, and he says “no, that's a USB supply, and this (shaking the in-flight magazine, that fount of accuracy and value) says that this plane has in-seat power in some rows. I want to know what those rows are.” He insists that he would have chosen a seat with a power supply if he knew. Now, bear in mind that Delta operates about ELEVEN different configurations versions of the 757, including former Northwest 757s, and even former TWA 757s. And if this idiot and his idiot companion got to pre-select exit row seating, they damn well fly enough to know that there are lots and lots of Delta 757s. The flight attendant is exceedingly pleasant about this idiot line of questioning, looks at the in-flight magazine, and ultimately asks EVERY other flight attendant on the plane. When she returns with various answers (such as that first class has power outlets at every row) the kind, polite answer “well, I asked every other flight attendant, we just don't know.” And Mr. Asshat responds, with a bizarre note of triumph in his voice: “Well, finally: that's one of two answers I find acceptable. The other one is where the power outlet is.”

Bear in mind this all goes down before the boarding door is even closed.

I need a drink.

Food!

J returns from Haiti tonight, and she put in a request for vegetables. I fly to Oakland tomorrow for food, beer, friends and family, so she'll be on her own. And I sorta worry that she doesn't eat that well when I'm not in town, which she insists is unwarranted. So I've been cooking and labeling like mad, and am about to head out to Whole Paycheck to be sure that she has good stuff in the fridge to eat. (Which presents a strange sort of a feedback loop, since her explanation of what she eats when I'm gone is leftovers.)

Some random food pics from the last few days:
Broccoli, taking a bath.

Flash frying the broccoli, which got some garlic added. The broccoli was a specific request.

Making pesto.

Flash frying some asparagus, which soon got garlic:

Dunno if six cloves was enough. Well, we don't go to dinner with the garlic that we want...

Making guacamole!

This was the basis of a potato-leek-tofu-onion soup I made the other day. Delicious, though the consistency wasn't quite right. I really needed an immersion blender to do it right.

And for A's benefit, a gratuitous shot of ONIONS!

Pizza!

It's been a little while since I made pizza, and I had a hankering and all the necessary ingredients.

I improvised a no-yeast dough which, unfortunately, kinda sucked. It was just too moist, even after waaaay longer in the oven than the toppings needed. Next time I'll cut the liquid (beer, int his case) in half and eliminate the olive oil from the mix.

It did roll out pretty, though.

The "sauce" for the first pizza was the chipotle sauce from the seitan the night before, and for the second a nice, simple combination of olive oil and sriracha sauce.

Brief side-story: In 2003 J and I visited Thailand, including the namesake city of the sauce. We had a fantastic little hut over the bay where world-famous seafood is caught and processed. I'd noticed some odd splashing noises when I was on the toilet, but not thought much of it until J was in the shower. I then went outside and realized that 100% of our shower water, sink water, and toilet waste was emptying directly into the bay. Sure glad we don't eat seafood!

And now, a step by step assembly of the second pizza: onions!

Cilantro!

Garlic! (Closeup, since I correctly guessed the garlic wouldn't have a sufficient contrast against the onions.)

See?

Broccoli, artfully arranged!

Sun dried tomatoes!

Unfortunately, I somehow failed to take a picture of the final baked product, due in part to my irritation of how long I had to bake it to get the dough to not be overly moist and doughy. Verdict: I'd do the toppings and sauce again, but the dough recipe left a lot to be desired.

Since I had some time while the pizza was baking, and some extra broccoli, I knocked out a quick flash-fried side of broccoli and red pepper flakes. Delicious!

And still more food porn! Seitan with chipotle sauce

Roughly, this is the seitan with ancho-chipotle sauce from 1,000 Vegan Recipes by Robin Robertson, on page 310. Except that I couldn't find ancho chiles (hey, I live in midtown Atlanta, not precisely a hotbed of ethnic grocery stores.) And I didn't have dried chipotles, so I just used a defrosted chipotle from the chipotle-painted baked tofu I made last week from the same cookbook.

The basic seitan recipe (p.305), fresh from the food processor, and looking pretty damn unappetizing. Kinda looks like rubber, which was roughly its consistency as well.

And oh, it can get even less appetizing looking.

And simmering it in the water, soy sauce, and garlic doesn't do it any wonders.

Brief interjection: the random groceries are pretty appetizing looking. I had to buy bread, since J is the chief baker (and I'm too lazy to learn to bake great bread) and the fire-roasted tomatoes are an important component in the (ancho)-chipotle sauce. The cilantro just looked good. And I might whip up some potato leek soup tonight. (Does it seem like I feel the need to justify my grocery choices? Weird.)

From unappetizing to borderline alien.

And now taking on a rather unpleasant swiss-cheese look.

Okay, starting to look much more appetizing, after slicing, and dredging in cornmeal, salt and pepper and frying. Bonus points for anyone who can pick out Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Mississippi.

Alright: now this is starting to look much more like something I'd actually want to put in my body.

Here is the sauce, simmering.

And this is what happens to sauce that doesn't play nice.

The seitan cutlets, looking creepily chicken-like.

And a largely duplicative shot of the seitan cutlets post-frying.

On balance, it was delicious. The sauce recipe made way too much, but provided a nice pizza sauce for last night's pizza. (Patience, patience!)

More, uhhh, food porn.

I just can't get enough. Even though J is still in Haiti, I'm cooking like every night is a dinner party. Chalk it up to a combination of irrational exuberance and poor judgment. Here is a basic stir-fry from just before my trip to oregon, step by step:

This broccoli needed to be used before I left, and had been in the fridge for a couple days, so it got an icewater bath to perk up a little while I knocked out the other ingredients.

Green peppers: a little boring, sure, but organic, and fairly cheap.

Carrots: ditto my comments on the green peppers. I actually really kind of dislike carrots: I don't much like sweet stuff, and particularly don't much like vegetables to be sweet. But I'm growing to appreciate carrots when prepared in a way that their sugar-y-ness is mitigated.

Obligatory composed shot, with garlic popping in.

This is part of what I was referencing above: stir-frying the carrots makes them more savory-sweet.

With the green peppers added after a couple minutes.

And finally with the broccoli (I apparently failed to take a final picture with the garlic added.)

Pretty tasty, but pretty basic. Stay tuned for more interesting/adventurous food porn!

How to walk out of the Eugene airport for fun and profit

The blog post you've all been waiting for: another in my blisteringly exciting series of how to walk out of airports for fun and profit! Faithful readers (all three of you) might recall the last installment was almost a year ago: How to walk out of JFK for fun and profit.

I just got back from Eugene, Oregon, and was a little dismayed to see that my options were to pay $21.50 for the OmniShuttle, or around $25-$28 before tip for a taxi. Inexplicably, even though Eugene has so-so public transit service, they haven't bothered to run a route to the airport, which is about ten miles west/northwest of downtown. So I set out to walk from the airport to the nearest bus route.

Your bus route choices are: closer to the airport, but an express route with limited frequency (LTD Route 95) and farther from the airport, but half-hourly service on weekdays (LTD Route 52.) The Route 95 is basically a rush hour-only express service, and doesn't run on Sundays, so I decided to ignore it. That said, if the times work for you, it'll cut off about half of the 3.5 mile walk.

HOW TO WALK FROM THE EUGENE, OREGON AIRPORT TO PUBLIC TRANSIT
Note that just like JFK, I'm providing step by step directions, with visual cues, to make this a little less nerveracking. Trust me: walking along a busy semi-rural road and avoiding the unrestrained dogs can be enough to worry about. If you don't need all the detail, just click on this map link, and get walking!


Okay: arriving at the airport, walk out of the terminal, and you'll be standing at the pickup/dropoff area on the sidewalk, looking east at the parking lot. Turn right/south, and walk along the sidewalk.

The sidewalk and road to exit the airport (with signs indicating "to Eugene" or the like) will curve left, follow along this. You'll be walking on grass. Ignore the guy on the big riding mower giving you stinkeye for walking on his freshly mowed grass. Intermittent sidewalks here on the south side of the street, google maps thinks this is Douglas Drive, heading southeast.

After about 1/3 of a mile, you'll merge onto what google maps thinks is Green Hill Road, but which wasn't clearly signed this way (I think this relates to relatively recent road construction.) Cross over to the east side of the street (so you're walking against traffic.)

Walk south along this road for about 1000 feet. You'll pass Old Airport Road, with signs to the Oregon Air and Space Museum (and "dead end" noted) on the west. The road will curve around to your left/east, and you'll see a fairly busy "T" intersection on the other side of the road.

Now walk along Airport Road for about a half mile, it'll curve northeast, and continue going east. IMPORTANT NOTE: on the image above, right after you come out of the curve and are again heading due east on Airport Road, look for the arrow cursor. On the north side of the road, at this arrow, there is a junkyard with a sign saying "KEEP OUT" and an aggressive dog not on a leash or runner. It charged me, I turned and screamed at it to back off, and it it ran away just as fast as it had come. You might prefer to briefly walk along the south side of the road here.

Turn left on W. Enid Road. You'll be walking by various light to medium industrial, metal fabricators, a self-storage area, and some blackberry-vine-covered undeveloped land. Turn right when the road does, it now becomes E. Enid Road. After about 300 feet, you'll reach Pacific Highway/Route 99, the most dangerous road crossing of the walk. Cross carefully! After you cross, you'll immediately walk over some railroad tracks, where a southeast-bound train could take you right into the west side of central Eugene. Use your imagination and common sense.

You'll now walk along E. Enid, past lumberyards and more light to medium industrial, and Brasher's Northwest Auto Auction on the north side of the road.

You'll "T" into Prairie Road, cross over and walk briefly south, taking the first left to walk east on Irvington Drive. This road crossing is also busy, but has a signalled crosswalk. You'll walk over more railroad tracks, but on these a southeast train would likely drop you right into the busy Eugene Yards, so use good judgment.

Walk along Irvington Drive for a little over a half mile, and look for Arrowhead City Park on the right: this is at the corner of Arrowhead Street. Turn right, and you'll immediately see your bus stop sign, with Route 52 on it.

Take the Route 52 south to downtown, $1.50 one-way, $3.00 day pass (which is their annoying equivalent of a transfer.) You can either go to Eugene Station, the main bus terminal, or for a fun beer detour, get off the bus at Blair Blvd and W. 4th Avenue, and walk north up Van Buren Street to Ninkasi Brewing Company's gorgeous new tasting room at 272 Van Buren, open 11-7 daily.

Total saved before drinking your savings up at Ninkasi (which, incidentally, is named after the Sumerian Goddess of Beer): approximately $20-$25. Yay!